You Have To Win The Game is a short retro platformer game designed to look as though it is being played on an old CRT monitor. The game isYou Have To Win The Game is a short retro platformer game designed to look as though it is being played on an old CRT monitor. The game is deliberately evocative of ages past, and contains various standard platforming puzzles.
Story
The game has no story.
Gameplay
At the start of the game, the character can do two things – move, and jump. Over the course of the game, the character also unlocks the ability to double jump and to wall jump, as well as activating red and blue walkway bricks; all four of these things open up new places for the player to go. The platforming starts out pretty easy, but gets progressively more difficult throughout the game. There are no bottomless pits in the game, but as per usual, there is lava and spikes.
Enemies in the game exist, but there are only a very small variety of them; however, this isn’t really a problem as the game is so short and the gameplay so basic. Touching any enemy is instant death, and there are fundamentally two kinds of “normal” enemies, creatures which crawl on the ground (snakes and crabs) and creatures which fly through the air (bats). In addition, there are a small number of unique monsters which spit out patterns of projectiles that the player must navigate through to win.
Most of the gameplay consists of exploring the environment, collecting all 64 money bags (though 5 of them are actually hearts instead, they serve the same purpose), unlocking all of the abilities, and navigating through to the end of the game, where there is a little mini-puzzle which allows you to “win” if you solve it. Winning or losing brings up a short message on screen, then sends you back to the beginning of the game without any upgrades, but all of the other collectibles remain collected.
The platforming is very basic, and overall the gameplay is very evocative of older platformer games, with very simple gameplay that isn’t anything special, but does what it needs to do. Unlike older platformers, are bells scattered throughout the game which serve as checkpoints, and their extremely high frequency means that the player is never sent back too far if they die; in this sense, the game is rather evocative of VVVVVV, in that the platforming deaths have little consequence because you can immediately try again, which is a good thing as it reduces frustration. The game gets to be fairly difficult by the end of it, but even still, the game is quite short; 100%ing the game took me under two hours, and to do that, you must beat it twice.
Graphics
The game is meant to look like it is being played on a computer out of the 1980s, and the game does a great job of achieving exactly that. This means, however, it isn't really very pretty to look at, though it is mostly reasonably clear what is going on; a few of the money bags are deliberately hidden by maching the surrounding colors closely, which is a somewhat questionable decision from the point of view of collectability, as all the others are simply hard to get to, whereas those two are easy to simply never see in the first place.
Final Summary
You Have To Win The Game is exactly what it promises to be – a retro platformer out of the 1980s. It isn’t the best platformer ever, but it is competent enough. However, there’s really nothing to recommend it either – if you miss out on this game, you aren’t missing anything from your life. If you get a free copy and are bored, you might get some enjoyment out of it, but there’s a reason games have moved on from such basic mechanics – they’re too limited to really grab you and leave you feeling as if you’ve done something new.… Expand
